[CCIP]

What I'm more worried about is how trench warfare is going to actually work. There's virtually nothing decisive to be done on the tactical level, in a form of warfare that is overwhelmingly dominated by artillery and its related logistics. Most of the meaningful input would be in managing resources and coordinating timings, not clicking on things that you want your units to shoot right that second. Any meaningful action would be on the operational level, but how do you model anything on that scale without reducing it, for lack of a better word, to a theme park ride? Any decisive operation in the trench warfare phase would be on the scale of hundreds of thousands of troops and take weeks of time. As for tactical actions, you'd be looking at a battlefield mostly dominated by concerns of fire support - on the attack, you assault a trench line, dig in, and wait for your fire support to move up, which would take hours or days. On the defense, you would retreat, reassess your fire support situation, and either counterattack or keep retreating, again usually on a scale of hours-to-days. Everything else on the battlefield, from boots on the ground and trench fortifications, to airplanes in the sky, is actually at the service of one mistress, and her name is artillery. And that's a form of warfare that has more in common with tax accounting than leading lines of spearmen into battle. I just don't see how that works in a TW format without really misrepresenting that form of warfare to begin with - and it's a very interesting form of warfare, but just not in that same way as Total War games.

Then again, maybe that's my issue - I want a faithful representation, and that honestly, I've lost a lot of faith in the Total War games because they seem to be firmly entrenched in that "theme park" mentality where you ride the rollercoaster into the gates of Carthage with the help of flaming pigs, after beating the screaming barbarian were-druids and Egyptian pharaohs whose dress sense is a couple of millenia out of style. It already seems to rely more on a view of history that's informed mostly by a mashup of the Gladiator, the Mummy, Asterix and Monty Python rather than actual research. I'm not especially interested in a WWI version of that either. Actually, to answer the original question, I think that would be pretty lame.